The Daycare Drubbing
Winning through Loss
I have three boys. All of them have attended daycare. My wife and I thought consistency in their schooling was of utmost importance. Each of the three boys first went to daycare after their first birthday. We chose a school we expected all three to attend for the duration. We were successful until COVID.
COVID hit when only my last son still had to finish pre-school. I must admit that I had always looked upon the weekly bill as an oppressive obligation. I became jubilant when the pre-schools were exempted from the lockdown order, even though the real schools closed. We suddenly had two school-aged children at home to navigate full-time employment and full-time Zoom school. We were ecstatic that the pre-school remained open, and I didn’t mind the payments any more.
The woman who ran the pre-school did not lose her mind. I remember her face when we dropped my son off the day after the lockdown began. He was one of four children in a class that used to be forty strong. I repeat, only four children came during the lockdowns.
She was sullen. Layoffs were imminent. New financing arrangements for the parents who were not coming had to be made. The parents complained they had to continue paying while not using the services.
I joked with her, that when the Governor’s staff was putting together the lockdown orders, whomever wrote it realized they had their own small kids in daycare, and had to get to work. With a slight of hand, they slipped in the pre-school exemption under everyone’s noses. It was funny. She laughed.
The lockdown was extended. More staff was laid off. Her rates discounted by 50% for the families that stayed home. Many families simply chose to not pay.
When the lockdowns ended, the masks began. She was reluctant to enforce the masking, but it was mandated, and the parents wanted it. Her longtime trusted employee who ran the day-to-day operations retired. She was absolutely fabulous, and it was a massive loss.
We had been friendly with this woman for roughly seven years. My wife and her worked out together. I felt awful for what she had to go through. I offered to buy her staff a pizza party once all of the re-opening phases were declared complete. I felt good about supporting this business during the lockdowns. She was thrilled that someone recognized the difficulty, and happily accepted.
Six months later, our Governor finally gave up and declared it over. He was one of the first and he had to wage a vicious fight against the entrenched hysteria, particularly in the schools.
During those six months, wave after wave of people moving from the northern states flooded into our state. Her business was now booming. She had opened a second pre-school.
The day the mandates were declared over, she immediately ended the requirement for her teachers to wear masks. The kids never had to wear them. I waltzed into the daycare with an ear-to-ear grin that afternoon, and I said, “So, when do you want to do the pizza party?!”
I purchased a nice bouquet of flowers for both centers’ front desk staff and pizza for all the teachers. The staff was ecstatic. Teachers I had never interacted with suddenly knew my name and said, “Hi”, and “Thanks”. They made me a gigantic card. It was colossal, a slice of pizza shaped paper the size of half a planet. All of the staff left signatures and words of thanks.
Meanwhile, the normal schools kept the masks. They doubled down on them. They refused, despite the Governor’s orders, to remove them. The parents at the daycare complained. The masks for the teachers returned.
I politely complained. I explained that the mandates were over and there was no longer a need, or a penalty for disobeying the mandates. I came to find out later, that our friend had bought into the masks. Even though she objected initially, I suppose it became a way for her to keep her business open. Everyone loved them anyways, and I was the sore thumb out. I was ignored.
At the time I viewed it as a necessary evil. My child was not wearing a mask, and that was preferable to my older two children who had to wear them at real school. My battle was focused primarily on the county school board to finally let go of their hysteria.
The owner of the daycare removed and reinstated the masks two more times over the next year. What finally broke the now tenuous relationship was an email my wife sent to the owner. In it she expressed concern about the quality of the front desk staff, and asked when school events like Muffins with Mom would be returning. Many of the other pre-schools in the area were completely normal.
She responded offended. We had been a problem since the beginning of the lockdown, and she terminated our child care at her school effective immediately.
My wife didn’t understand how what she had said would cause that reaction. I comforted her, and told her it didn’t matter and I was proud of her. We would find another daycare or we would keep him home. We were homeschooling the older two boys already anyhow.
It was very difficult to find a new daycare quickly. All of the new immigrants from the northern states had taken all of the empty spots. The infrastructure had not yet caught up.
We were very lucky in that a newly built center had an opening for VPK - the year before kindergarten, and still eight months away. After we had secured that spot, we were luckier still, one of the other newly arriving families was unable to move and only three weeks after our expulsion, our youngest was in a new daycare. A completely normal daycare ran by a sweetheart of a woman.
We learned that our initial ideas about consistency were not very relevant or important. It was not worth it to hold on to the idea we had at the start. We should have been looking for a new daycare the second we weren’t comfortable as opposed to trying to communicate our concerns. If we had done that, we would have avoided the daycare drubbing.